It was rather surreal.  In the middle of General Ricahrd B. Myers’s speech, a man with a video camera suddenly stood up.  He started asking a question. I was sitting so far away from the man and I concentrated on taking notes on what General was saying that I did not quite catch what he was trying to ask.  The whole crowd gasped and some of them started shouting, yelling and a former USAF retired man and the security took the cameraman out of the Richard Nixon museum lecture room.  A USAF retired man then introduced himself to the General and the crowd.  Another man tried to start up a question and the Air Force retired man dragged this another man out of the room.  General Myers was acting calmly looking toward my direction where I probably was the only person got frozen with the whole confusion with my note and pen still in hand.  He even told how these people were just exercising their rights. 

 

Former four star General, the Chief of Space Command, and the Chief of Joint Chief of Staff, Richard B. Myers came to a talk on his new book Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security at the Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace foundation.  As I understand, (for now) what has been going on from the time of September 11th attack to today, Gen. Myers headed the JSC at an extremely controversial time.  The political climate of the US split where the Republicans and Democrats appeared to engage in fierce political struggle to put blames upon various political figures and organizations as the country delved into two military endeavors in Afghanistan and later in Iraq.   In such a divisive ambiance, General Myers shrived until September 30, 2005.

 

At the lecture, he talked about his confusion over how to write a book and his struggle to get the job done with a help of Malcolm McConnell and some people, mentioned in his acknowledgement chapter.  While he was talking, he revealed the sad situation the military people where he was not trained to criticize.  He was trained to make decisions but not to criticize.  He rather decided to write his book to reveal his views toward various political figures as such as President George W. Bush Jr., Vice President Richard Cheney and Secretary of Defense Donald Rumsfeld. 

 

In the lecture, General Myers emphasized the importance of strategic thinking where he explained how it is important to focus on the political, diplomatic, economic, societal and cultural ground adding to just the military power as for the global defense in order to fight against the Islamic extremism.  He did not point toward the whole entire Islamism, however, he emphasized how its not whole Islamic community but it is more on the extremist factions. 

 

He also elaborated more on how he had to face the difficulty of how to harness the power in the time of distress and fear in the post 9/11 attacks.  How do you convince men and women not to join the terrorist organizations? How do you make the people cope with the “fear” after the terror attacks?  How do you cope with the disaster like the scale of Katrina? How do you train people to cope with fear, anxiety, distress and disaster?  Problems flooded D.C. 

 

The most interesting part of the lecture was how Gen. Myers mentioned his impression on Vice President Cheney and Secretary of Defense Rumsfeld.  While participating in the meeting with the major figures of the Bush, Jr. Administration, Gen. Myers thought that Rumsfeld gave President Bush, Jr. thorough 360° brief providing various options existing compared to Vice President Cheney. 

 

General Myers also answered the audience’s question over the Anthrax scare and the fear factor issue and how to separate the immediate crisis and the notion of fear.  General told how easy it is to instigate fears among the population.  He then brought up the incident over Koran flashing down the toilet.  A story came out on a prison guard flashing Koran down the toilet where it instigated massive protest in the Middle Eastern region.  The government investigated on the incident while attempting to trace how information travels over time.  While the incident news dominated for few days, the news went away with the other news dominating the media.  He mentioned how people can be trained to cope with troubles though there are limitation to those where it is still an interesting puzzle to think about.

 

For more information on General Richard Myers: 

Eyes on the Horizon: Serving on the Front Lines of National Security.  Amazon.com

http://www.amazon.com/Eyes-Horizon-Serving-National-Security/dp/1416560122 

 

Gen. Richard B. Myers Media Stakeout at River Entrance Pentagon.  Department of Defense.

http://www.defenselink.mil/transcripts/transcript.aspx?transcriptid=3252 

Meet the Former Chairman of the U.S. Joint Chiefs of Staff!  Richard Myers Richard Nixon Library and Birthplace Foundation
http://www.nixonlibraryfoundation.org/   

 

Northrop Grumman-Richard Myers

http://www.northropgrumman.com/leadership/bios/richard_myers.html 

 

Profile: Richard B. Myers.  History Commons.

http://www.historycommons.org/entity.jsp?entity=richard_b._myers 

 

 

Richard Myers-the Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Richard_Myers 

 

Richard B. Myers News-New York Times.

http://topics.nytimes.com/topics/reference/timestopics/people/m/richard_b_myers/index.html 

These are a couple of cool ideas -- Nerd Merit Badges! I think the zero-inbox one would be a fantastic birthday present. I should forward it to my wife...

Open Source Contributor

Inbox Zero

I was able to take several weeks off at Christmas and visit both my and my wife's family.  Unfortunately, we weren't able to see my sister (in Virginia) or brother (in South Korea), but we spent time with every other close relative.  It was fantastic to just relax for a while, as life has been quite busy. 

I've been putting together a conference paper with the early results of my social portfolio tool usage by my class last term.  The results are fairly positive, with students voluntarily using it at a very high rate.  There's a nice correlation between the final grade and the frequency with which people were viewed by others, meaning that students decided to look at the best peer work.

My tool is a plug-in for Elgg, an open source social networking system.  I've been involved in the project for 3 years now, but am considering moving the tool into a stand-alone system.  It'd be fairly easy to support single-sign-in from Elgg, and it'd keep me from having to rewrite the plug-in for the 1.2 version of Elgg.  The company supporting the tool did a complete rewrite, and I'm not groking some of the design.  The community has also been rather disfunctional of late, and coordination with the main devs has always been a source of stress. I really enjoy programming, and am looking forward to redesigning some of the Elgg v.9 stress points.  Getting a good set of unit tests in place would make me quite happy.

 

 

This is rather neat.  I rated a mention in the Woodbury Annual "State of the Faculty" address (page 6). I particularly like the note about working with all 'modes (and moods) of faculty.'  Thanks Vic!

Academic Support
The Faculty Association gratefully acknowledges the great strides the university has made in planning and communication due to its creation of the position of Institutional Researcher. The university is truly fortunate to have filled that position with Nathan Garrett, whose knowledge and educational preparation, boundless energy, keenly clear thinking, unflagging good humor, and willingness to work with all modes (and moods) of faculty seem tailor-made for Woodbury’s needs and aspirations.

Well, this has been a busy month.  Rose came 2 weeks early, weighing in at 7'6 and 20 1/2 long.  She and Mom are doing really well, and we're slowly getting used to having a 4-person family. 

I've been able to wrap up a bunch of projects over the last 3 weeks, and am possibly going to get a bit of a break this Fall term. This next term will be the first break in a while without extensive school responsibilities. I've been doing the full-time work, full-time school gig for years, so it'll be great to slow down and enjoy weekends at home instead of at the library.

I recently purchased a 2nd-hand 2G iPhone.  I'm incredibly impressed with the device.  The combination of a Unix sub-system, an awesome display, and WiFi (I don't have a data-plan) make it an incredibly compelling package.  The screen is quite usable for reading.  I read a lot while we were in the hospital with Rose, as the combination of public wifi and lots of time burping a baby were a good combination.

Of course, the hamstrung OS / Apple restrictions are very frustrating. I don't understand why they couldn't have made it operate as a USB drive, similar to their older iPod line.  I jailbroke mine to enable loading on a book reading software, and have been loading of Project Gutenburg texts. Only by jailbreaking, and SSHing into the os as root did I really understand that they have a genuine *nix box.  The idea of running Apache on my phone is just very cool. 

Now if I can just get the keyboard to buzz a little bit on each keypress, I'll be a happy camper.

To those who follow such matters, i have uploaded my dissertation proposal (click here), which i hope to defend in the upcoming weeks...

Feel free to critique my work, rate this blog (based on my work), etc.  

Enjoy. 

Oh yes, it's as amaaaazing as it sounds.  See it online before Sunday for free.  

 

Crossposted from http://www.mfeldstein.com/ 

 

Is this our modern course management system? 

Sitting at a desk, staring at a screen, and punching buttons in a Pavlovian manner works for educational technology nerds like myself.  It's an efficient way to transmit information, but it doesn't provide the rich education that liberal arts colleges promise.  A college diploma is more than a set of facts; it is a maturing of the entire person through a conversation with other people, theories, and disciplines.

Studio education is used in many design disciplines as a way to bring students into a discipline.  Making learning public, these disciplines give us a model for the next generation of educational technology.  Rather than worrying about peer learning "leading" to cheating, why don't we think about its power to engage and inspire?

Social software like blogs and wikis work. Claremont Graduate University has been using Elgg, a social software system, to support courses for the last two years. 

We've learned that: 

1. Students place a high value upon ownership of their content.
2. They benefit from peer learning.
3. Most are motivated by the public nature of their work.

Taking these principles, and building on educational theory, I have developed a design theory on how to build social portfolio software.  This design centers around three core principles. 

A social portfolio should:

1. Support student ownership
2. Enhance peer learning
3. Focus on ease of use

Below is a walkthrough of my eportfolio software.  It is currently in its 8th major version, and is used by a wide variety of organizations and schools around the world.  While still having a ways to go, it helps to demonstrate some of my beliefs about how a portfolio system should work.

link: http://www.vimeo.com/1258170

Elgg and my plug-in are both licensed under the GPL, meaning that anyone is free to download, use, and modify it as they please.  People interested in learning more are encouraged to visit my blog at http://conversation.cgu.edu/garrettn/weblog for updates, or to contact me through email at nathan.garrett@cgu.edu.

Flicker Credits:
•    Writeable Walls InQbate CETL in Creativity University of Sussex
•    1975: And the Changes To Come

I posted an overview of my research.  It's fairly short, and gives a nice human readable view of what I try to accomplish.

I decided to not migrate over all of my old Blog posts.  There's something nice about a clean slate.  I put up a few unpublished posts that have been knocking around my drafts box for the past month or two.  They are a little dated, but are mostly accurate.  More content should come up as I get time to work on my research.